Thin monarchs tanning
along the edge of a loan system
at ease on some historical
antbed tennis-court
while the fat peasants
are pissing against the wind
in a daydream
of baccarat tables
and local bubbly.

In the Suburbs of Private Life

Pussyfooting indoors, the tacky
media bunging your sinuses with newsy
economies going through the floor,
it's time to take the air.

Under the daylit, heavily
not-yet flowering gumtree
it conceivably does you good
to ignore the flop-flip-flop
of atrociously pink camellias

Maybe it's just plain beaut
to up and get out of doors
into unpainted otherness where
you don't have to match up dry socks

or catch the footy scores,
with a manic imported thrush
overhead in a spotted vest
singing a repertoire to rags.

And the phone is ringing
its nasty little head right off.

Note: "footy scores" = football game results

CHRIS WALLACE-CRABBE, poet and essayist, keeps writing away in the Australian Centre at the University of Melbourne. His Selected Poems 1956-1994, won the Melbourne (Australia) Age Book of the Year Prize for 1995 and the D.J. O'Hearn Prize for Poetry. He has published thirteen collections of verse, as well as artists' books. With Kerry Flattley he edited the Amnesty International anthology, From the Republic of Conscience, which has recently been pirated into Icelandic. Wallace-Crabbe's new collection of poems, Whirling, was published by Oxford University Press in 1998, followed by Author, Author!, a wicked collection of literary anecdotes. You can read another poem by Chris Wallace-Crabbe in Jacket # 12.